Getting Traffic By Complaining Creatively
July 10, 2009 by Vision
Filed under Blog, Online Marketing
Sometimes you just have to think outside the box to get a little traffic to your site.
A little over a year ago, a Canadian musician Dave Carroll took a flight fro Halifax to Nebraska, changing plans in Chicago. During the entire process, his guitar – which I’m sure he had to pay extra for – was damaged. Over a year later, and major hours of time spent with United trying to recover for damages, Carroll is finally getting his payback.
After all the frustration, Carroll decided to handle his complaint with United in a different way. He was a musician, right? Why not create a song?
So he did. And he recorded a simple video to go along with it. And he put it on YouTube.
And well, the rest as they say is history.
He put the YouTube video up on his profile July 6th. That’s just 4 days ago. And at the time of this writing he has had 1,384,878 views. And CNN picked it up as a major story.
And he’ll be on several of the morning shows as well.
Bad for United. Great for Dave Carroll.
As an artist, this could definitely be a way for him build a following, and to create more music sales. On his home page you have three focuses: watch the video, visit him on iTunes, or follow him on Twitter. Smart move.
We all talk about doing something creative with YouTube. Carroll actually did it. And I’m sure he’ll be running all the way to the bank with his creativity. Oh, and also be able to replace that broken guitar.
Great point! I think increasingly, the notion of a “home page” is irrelevant. Appropriate branding and intuitive navigation has to occur throughout the site.
Remember “frames”? When sometimes you’d end up on a content page that was intended to be housed within a larger frameset, that would provide the branding and navigation? That is no longer a technical concern, but we still need to be conscious of how to optimize the experience for site visitors, regardless of how they landed on your site.